Becoming Better Theologians (part 25)

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Becoming Better Theologians (part 26)

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Our Father, we come before You this morning just rejoicing that You would love such as us, that You would send
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Your Son to die in our place. Lord, as we gather here this morning, just pray that it would be a time of blessing to those who are here and a time of glorification for You, that You would be glorified in what we do today, that we would be honoring of You in every way.
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Father, bless this time as we look to Your Word, in Christ's name, Amen. Well last week
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I said a lot of confusing things, but I'm going to straighten all that out.
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Every single thing I said that was curvy will be straightened today. But first I have to ask you, what is the significance of Friday to most of us?
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Friday is the end of the work week. What else? Jesus died on Friday.
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How about it's a day to go to mosque? That's the day that Muslims worship.
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And I decided, I was really curious, I'm always looking for something to kind of start
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Sunday morning off. And it struck me as really curious, there's a brand new book out and it's called
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Every Day a Friday. Every Day a
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Friday. Anybody know who wrote that book?
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Joel Osteen. I didn't even know about that book until today. I was like, every day a
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Friday. I mean, I would think that a Christian author would write something like, every day is the
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Lord's day. Every day a Sunday. Every day a worship day.
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Every day a Friday. I mean it kind of sounds disco -ish,
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I don't even get it. Every day a Friday. Your best life now, every day a Friday, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.
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I'm Joel Osteen. Okay. Actually, that was a really terrible name for a book, unless you're not a
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Christian. I don't know. Just odd. Very odd. Okay, last week, talking about Israel owning the land.
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And some astute observers in the class, namely my wife who's sick,
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Steve Pru, who is not sick, that I know, pointed to Joshua.
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So let's turn to Joshua. You know, I have a hobby, it's unfolding the folded pages of my
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Bible, I hate that. Joshua 21, verses 43 to 45.
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And would somebody read that, please? Bruce. And there you have it,
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Israel possessed all the land, Steve is wrong. And furthermore, someone astutely pointed out, even
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John MacArthur agrees that Steve is wrong. Listen, in the authorized version, the notes, it says here, this sums up God's fulfillment of his covenant promise to give
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Abraham's people the land. Boom, Steve's wrong. I don't know what to say.
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I didn't learn anything in seminary, apparently. Oh, keep reading. God also kept his word in giving his people rest.
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In a valid sense, the Canaanites were in check, under military conquest as God had pledged.
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Not posing an immediate threat, period. Not every enemy had been driven out, however, leaving some to stir up trouble later.
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But God's people failed to exercise their responsibility and possess their land to the full degree in various areas.
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Maybe Steve's not completely wrong. Let's listen to some other commentaries here.
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This is from the New American Commentary, basically written by Southern Baptists.
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These verses emphasize the totality of Israel's success, the overarching picture of complete victory, and the all -encompassing nature of God's faithfulness to his promises and his people.
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It is of a piece with similar passages, such as, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It does not echo the passages that stand in tension with it, which speaks of, listen, unfinished business of lands that remain to be captured.
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Yet on its own terms, it does present an accurate picture of the prevailing situation at the time.
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Another man says this. This is John Wolvard, formerly president of Dallas Seminary.
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He says this, the unfaithfulness of Israel, in other words, in not driving out all their enemies and not possessing all the land, in no way impugned the faithfulness of God.
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So what Wolvard's essentially saying is, this passage is talking about the faithfulness of God.
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We could talk about the sovereignty of God, and then we have the responsibility of man, and that's what we're talking about here. This is the sovereignty of God, the faithfulness of God, and in contrast with the faithlessness of Israel.
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Some theologians, Wolvard goes on to say, have insisted that the statement in Joshua 21, 43 means the land promise of the
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Abrahamic covenant was fulfilled then. But this cannot be, this cannot be true because later the
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Bible gives additional predictions about Israel possessing the land after the time of Joshua. For example,
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Amos 9, verses 14 and 15, and then he says, Joshua 21, 43, therefore refers to the extent of the land as outlined in Numbers 34 and not the ultimate extent as would be in the
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Messianic kingdom, yadda, yadda, yadda. Now let's just, let's turn to one verse that he mentions in particular,
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Wolvard does. Let's look at Genesis 17, 8. Genesis 17 is one of the restatements of the
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Abrahamic covenant. I mean, God made a covenant with Abraham, with Abram originally, in Genesis 12, amplified it and really executed it in Genesis 15, and then restated it a few times.
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And let's just pick up the context here in Genesis 17, verse 1. When Abram, not yet Abraham, was 99 years old, still no child, right?
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The Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly.
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Then Abram fell on his face and God said to him, behold, my covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.
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No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.
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I will make you exceedingly fruitful and I will make you into nations and kings shall come from you.
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And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant.
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To be God to you and to your offspring after you.
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And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession and I will be their
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God. You notice anything there?
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Everlasting possession kind of stands out to me. Brian. Right. Father of nations, plural.
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And so, I mean, we could view that in a number of ways, but I think ultimately, if we if we just focus on the land for a moment, because that's the issue that we're looking at.
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If we look at the land and we say it's going to going to be an eternal possession, well, we know from approximately,
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I think now I didn't look this up, so I could be wrong, but I think it's about 130 A .D.
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Mentioned it before, the Roman Caesars, the emperors there, they had this constant trouble in Israel and it was in 70
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A .D. that the Jews rebelled. I think it was about 66
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A .D. actually, but the Romans sent in their troops, their legions and they besieged
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Jerusalem and they conquered it. And what do they do in 70 A .D.? They destroyed the temple.
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Now, you would think, you know, for most of us, we at the center of our religion have been destroyed and we, you know, we've just been whooped up on by the
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Romans that we would just kind of settle down. That didn't really happen in Israel because it was about 130
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A .D. they started another rebellion. They didn't really like this whole and rightfully not, they didn't like the whole polytheistic culture of the
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Romans. They didn't like, you know, having to in one way or another acknowledge
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Roman rule. So they rebelled again in 130 A .D. I believe it was
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Hadrian sent in the legions again and they didn't just destroy
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Jerusalem this time, what did they do? Any students of history?
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They took all the Jews out of the land. And what else do they do?
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This place is no longer going to be called Israel, it's going to be called Palestine. Palestine.
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I mean, you want to know where the whole Palestinian -Israeli conflict starts, it starts right there because before that, it wasn't called
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Palestine, it was called Canaan or it was called Israel, but it was not called Palestine. They renamed the place
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Palestine, they dispersed the Jews all over the place because they're like, you know what? We're not going to have any more rebellions and the only way to make sure that we don't have any more rebellions is move them out.
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So from 130 A .D. until 1948, there was no nation at all called
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Israel, didn't exist. And even in 1948, again for those of you who've studied history, what happened in 1948?
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It really began, yes, Bruce?
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Balfour Declaration. Balfour Declaration was before that, but yes, they fulfilled basically the
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Balfour Declaration, this idea that the United Nations was going to give Israel, the
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Jews, a homeland in light of the Holocaust and everything else. But the borders were pretty unique, you know, to say the least, because it really was not, you know, it kind of looked like some of our congressional districts, you know, kind of here and it just kind of, if you've ever looked at any of those maps.
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Anyway, so the point is, they didn't possess the land for, what, 1800 years?
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They weren't in any part of it. And even now, they don't have the full extent of the land. So when we see everlasting possession, to me,
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I don't know, call me old fashioned, but everlasting, if you look at the Hebrew, everlasting has a unique meaning.
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It means everlasting, as in permanent. So I don't know how we can say that.
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Another commentator says, this is from the
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Expositor's Bible commentary, says it emphasizes God's sovereign action. The land was God's gift to Israel, God's oath to Abraham, et cetera, et cetera.
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And finally, one last guy says this.
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He says, already in Joshua, chapter 13, verses 1 to 7, God highlights the incomplete conquest of the land.
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Commentators have traditionally stressed the difference between God's faithfulness and the people's lack of faithfulness.
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Thus, Kyle and Delitch, who wrote a very complete
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Old Testament commentary, they quote Calvin, John Calvin said this, it is right to distinguish well between the clear, unwavering and certain fidelity of God and the fulfillment of his promises and the weakness and indolence of the people, which caused the blessings of God to slip from their hands.
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Consequently, though they did not destroy them all so as to empty the land for their own possession, the truth of God stood out as distinctly as if they had, for there would have been no difficulty in their accomplishment of all that remained to be done if they had only been disposed to grasp the victories that were already that were ready to their hand.
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I mean, we see this time and time again where the Jews just failed to take the victory that that God had provided for them.
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And so anyway, that's the land issue, the promises thereof, and I have to apologize to everybody because my wife told me this morning, you know, since she's sick, she said, you can't say anything interesting this morning.
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So I apologize ahead of time. All right.
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One more issue and then we'll then we'll get into. We're never going to finish all this today.
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I brought so much stuff. I mean, I was homesick yesterday and I was just reading stuff all day long, so we're just it's like, you know, potpourri for 2000.
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All right. We talked about our need for the righteousness of Christ last week also, and I did this in the context of covenantal and covenantal theology and dispensational theology.
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And I'm going to get to that in just a minute because somebody said to me this week, they said, OK, now I'm really confused because I just want to know whether we're covenantal or dispensational.
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So we're going to be handing out T -shirts this week that say, you know, covenantal on the front and dispensational on the back.
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We're a covenantal dispensationalist. Thank you. People look at you and think that that doesn't make any sense.
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I just if we get into the extremes of both camps, I mean, how many of you. Maybe we should have every eye closed before we say this.
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How many of you have read or seen the movie The Left Behind series? I just absolutely you know,
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I thankfully I was in seminary when those came in and I absolutely refused to read them. My wife read them and she was just like she goes, you know, they're really neat until the last few where it was like, you know, it covered 45 minutes of the, you know, tribulation of talking about milking the series.
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I mean, the best thing about them was I really do think they were because I'm believers who were reading them as well.
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They were an opportunity to talk about Christ. But, you know, I mean, I think there's an excess on the one side.
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And then I think there may be excesses on the other side, the covenantal side, too. And so we'll talk about that a little bit.
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But let's open our Bibles to Romans for Roger Nicole, who once preached in this church.
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Can you believe that? How many were here when Roger Nicole preached? I see no hands.
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OK, so I guess it was a long time ago. Charlie was here, but I think he was probably tuning his guitar.
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Do you remember that at all? Roger Nicole is, you know, now in heaven and has perfect theology.
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He had pretty good theology anyway, so. He wrote an article a few years ago and he says that there's a there's a movement right now and we've talked about it a little bit.
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I mean, it's been going on for the last 10 years or so. Kind of pushed by a man named N .T.
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Wright, who is an Anglican bishop, and that means he's with the Church of England or the
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Episcopalian Church. And his base of the thrust of his position is the perfect obedience of Christ to the
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Mosaic law does not does not apply to those who believe in him because we don't. Really need it, per se, and that's not the issue that Paul was ever addressing.
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Now, according to the reformed understanding of Scripture, the active obedience of Christ is imputed to justified believers as their positive cover in the last judgment.
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Now, I want to analyze that for just a minute before we go to Romans four versus three to twenty four. What does it mean?
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That Christ's active obedience is imputed to justified believers, first of all, what does that mean?
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Pam, he kept the law on our behalf, what he did is reckoned to us, it's from the
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Greek word lugged, lugged, am I? And and now to that last part there as their positive cover in the last judgment, it's counted to believers as their positive cover in the last judgment.
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Well, what's the last judgment? I'm sorry. Great white throne, you stand before Christ and.
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You know, are you going to heaven or not? Why would we need a positive cover,
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Charlie? It is alien, so I like that cover idea because it's not inherent in us, it is external, it is not belonging to us, it is appropriated to us, it is our covering.
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That would be a great way to talk about Christ's righteousness. There's our covering. And so that when we are judged on the final day, we don't get judged on our own merits, how much we had left in the treasury of merit.
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But I digress. But it's on Christ's merit, his perfection, his perfect obedience.
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That's why we get to go to heaven. Now let's read Romans four, three to twenty four. And would someone like to read that, please?
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Yes. OK, now, did you see a word that was repeated?
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I don't know how many times in there counted. You know, I mean, it was counted, counted, counted, counted, counted, counted.
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And it's it's that verb legitimized reckoned some translations have it.
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And it's that idea of imputation, you know, that things were transferred to our account, even though we didn't do it.
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And it's, again, interesting, right in the beginning. And this is a theme that is just repeated over and over again, it's pretty hard to miss.
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Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. And then it goes on to say that if.
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Basically, if it was that belief. If it was self -generated or works.
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Then he would have something to boast about, right, it says now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due.
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In other words, if he generated his own faith, then he would have earned something. He would have merited something, but he didn't.
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He didn't deserve anything but. Hell, any more than anybody else.
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And Nicole says this, he says, what is credited is not the believers good work in obedience to God's law, not even his faith is meritorious, but one is justified by grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ, justified by grace through.
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Faith, we would say, but that faith is not of our own, right, so that we don't have anything to boast of, and that is just completely different than the
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Armenian view. And Nicole also says this, he says.
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You know, against the idea that maybe you want to, if you're just justified, you could do whatever you want, then you can sin, he says, if Christians are viewed by God as covered with the righteousness of Christ, it is urged, it does not matter what sins they may commit, says this is a travesty of justification, a position that would achieve impunity and forget that our savior suffered and died for our sins is the very reverse of what
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God teaches everywhere. If someone asserts that faith in Christ opens the door to sinning, it is obvious that faith is not alive, but dead.
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But anyway, the key point there is, it is reckoned to us, Christ's righteousness is reckoned or counted to us, and it's on that basis that we are declared just and are allowed to enter heaven.
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So that's the act of obedience, his perfect obedience to the law. I've mentioned this before, but you know, the clearest example, he obeyed his mother and a father, he never violated any part of the law, and we have to have perfection.
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Matthew 5 .48 says we have to be perfect to enter the kingdom of heaven, and so he achieved that on our behalf. So that's that.
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Now, getting back to this whole covenantalism versus dispensationalism, and I want to just go to a passage that I've mentioned before, but we're going to deal with it a little bit more this morning.
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Revelation chapter 20, and I've got a zillion different takes on this, which
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I think you might find interesting. I mean, this is this is
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I mean, to me, this is very clear cut, but that's because I'm me and I'm not as smart as some of these guys starting in verse one.
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Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain, and he seized the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan and bound him for a thousand years and threw him into the pit and shut it and sealed it over him so that he might not deceive the nations any longer until the thousand years were ended.
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After that, he must be released for a little while now.
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All that's saying I'm going to be naming names and and whatnot, because there are some men in here that I just, you know, if if you've ever heard me quote anyone.
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I think I probably quoted Simon Kistemacher as much as I've quoted anybody in, you know, in any message or anything that I've ever said.
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And what do you hear what he says about that passage? I still love him, but just those three verses.
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Now, this is from the expositors commentary, a man named A .F. Johnson, he says, Charles, a commentator, has described this passage as, listen, it seemed pretty simple, but listen, as a constant source of insurmountable difficulty for the exegete.
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In other words, the people who go and study this, it is hopelessly confusing. Burkhardt, great
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European theologian, has called the millennium one of the most controversial and intriguing questions of eschatology.
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He feels that one's view of Revelation 20 is internally connected with the rest of one's eschatology.
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In other words, how you interpret those three verses will flavor, will color everything else that you believe about end times.
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While the Old Testament and later Jewish literature pointed forward to a time when the kingdom of God would be manifest in the world, nowhere in Jewish literature is the time of the reign of the
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Messiah stated to be a thousand years. And he goes on to say, the exegesis of the passage leads me to a premillennial interpretation.
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He says the duration of the reign of Christ, which is equal to the duration of the binding of Satan, let's look at that again,
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Revelation chapter 20, he's going to be in verse two, he's going to be bound for a thousand years and then let's read on to verse four.
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Then I saw thrones and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed.
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Also, I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, for the word of God and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands.
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They came to life and reigned with Christ. For a thousand years.
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So this man says Satan's bound for a thousand years, Christ reigns for a thousand years, and those two things are it's the same period of time.
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This is the main problem concerns whether a reference to a millennium indicates an earthly historical reign of peace that will manifest itself at the close of this present age.
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In other words, a premillennial kingdom. We're living in the time before the millennium, the millennium, the thousand year reign of Christ is yet to come, or whether the whole passage is symbolic of some present experience of Christians.
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OK, in other words, the kingdom is present now, the the kingdom of Christ is present now.
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Satan is bound now because those two things are simultaneous or whether the whole passages or whether some future non -historical reality.
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And this is what tears these theologians up, says the ancient church down to the time of Augustine.
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Unquestionably held to the teaching of an earthly historical reign of peace that was to follow the defeat of Antichrist and the physical resurrection of the saints, but to precede both the judgment and the new creation.
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So it was premill. Then there was a late fourth century interpreter,
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Tychonius dependent on anybody. No, he was dependent on the allegorical interpretation of origin.
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Anybody know who origin is? Origin was a very brilliant theologian for his time, 4th century
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A .D., but he he sort of took things literally when when they shouldn't be taken literally.
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And here he's laughing. He took things literally when maybe they shouldn't have been taken so literally.
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And he allegorized when maybe they shouldn't have been allegorized. Jesus said, you know, if your right hand caused you to stumble, cut it off.
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Well, origin apparently had some difficulties. And so he.
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Mutilated himself so that he wouldn't sin in a particular area. He took the word of God seriously, didn't want to sin, but I would say that's probably an external thing that, you know, didn't really change his heart, but be that as it may.
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But he his school of thinking, this kind of. Allegorization really caught hold.
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What do I mean by allegorization? How do you take something and turn it into an allegory?
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There are many examples I could give. I mean, I know that some people this is this part is at least interesting to me.
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Jonah, we look at it and we say, well, that's a real person who lived in real time and really disobeyed the
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Lord and the Lord overrode his choices and blessed anyway. Well, a lot of people take the story of Jonah as a story.
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It's an allegory. You know what not to do, and of course, the official
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Catholic position on that is they don't have a position, but a more common use of allegory, for example, would be in parables.
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Historically, parables have been distorted something fiercely, you know, the parable of the
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Good Samaritan. Instead of Jesus making the point about. Serving and who's your neighbor and all this, it turned into this huge thing about, well, the the
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Samaritan man is this and the road is this and it all these different symbols were imported into it until you really couldn't tell what it meant.
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And that's this allegorization school of thinking. And so this is what eventually crept into.
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The interpretation of. Revelation and including Revelation, chapter 20.
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And listen to this, this has become, I think, probably the prevailing thought in reformed circles, this is the prevailing thought that the binding of Satan.
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Had already taken place in that the devil cannot seduce the church during the present age.
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So Satan is bound right now, that would be the covenantal
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Amil historical position. And I'm going to kind of go a little faster here through this, you say, thankfully.
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OK, let me see, let me make sure
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I've got the name right here, who this is. I don't, so it doesn't matter. OK, why the millennium?
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There are at least four answers to this question during the millennium. This is from a premill view.
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Christ will openly manifest his kingdom in world history. In other words, it's not some secret spiritual kingdom that's somehow taking place right now.
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The millennium will provide an actual demonstration of the truthfulness of the divine witness born by Christ and his followers during their life on Earth.
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It will be a time of the fulfillment of all God's covenant promises to his people. All his covenant promises to his people.
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We read Genesis 17, eight earlier, where God says to Abraham, I will give your people the land or your descendants the land as what an eternal possession forever and ever and ever.
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So that will happen, that will take place during the millennium. The millennium, secondly, will reveal that man's rebellion against God lies deep in man's own heart, not in the devil's deception.
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Why? Because he's going to be bound for a thousand years, right? Not able to save anyone. And yet people are still going to ultimately rebel.
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This is third point. The release of Satan after the millennium shows the invulnerability of the city of God and the extent of the authority of Christ since the devil is immediately defeated and cast into the lake forever.
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The millennium, fourthly, will serve as a long period required to do the general house cleaning.
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I don't really go for that one. But anyway, it's kind of kind of interesting. But this is another historical position.
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Some have interpreted the binding of Satan as the work of Christ in the lives of believers. In other words, he's bound in your life.
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He can no longer deceive you if you're a believer. I don't know if I can go for that.
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And then they refer to Mark three. Let's go to Mark three twenty seven. I've heard this applied to this idea.
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Mark three twenty seven, but no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he binds the strong man.
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Thus, that is proof that Satan is banned now. That's kind of proof texting here.
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Here's what I here's a basic problem, I think, with hermeneutics, with the way we study scripture, the way we interpret scripture.
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I think you have a real issue any time that you want to take your first step is cross -reference.
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Why? Why is that a problem? You take it out of context immediately.
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Now, if your interpretation, for example, you're reading one passage and you say, wow, boy, it seems like we're free to sin.
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I'm just throwing it out as an example. Well, then your understanding of other scriptures can come into play.
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You go, oh, wait a minute, I must not have that right because the word of God doesn't contradict itself. So maybe
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I need to go back into the context. But what you cannot do is say, well, you know, I think in Mark three twenty seven, it means this.
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So therefore, I'm going to cut and paste my understanding of three twenty seven and move that to Revelation 20. You can't do that.
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Our goal when we study the Bible is what we want to cut it straight.
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We want to get right. And what does that mean? That means driving back to authorial intent. We want to know what the original author, the
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Holy Spirit, the original author, the human author, what they had in mind. What we don't want to do is get caught up in some preset system wherein we feel free to take the words of Paul and to use that to influence
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John or the words of Mark and influence John or the words of John to influence Luke.
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We just don't want to do that. That's one of the problems, too. People fall into this trap.
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There's another one, you know, D .A. Carson refers to it in one of his books, the fallacy of word study.
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What a given word means, you know, in different places doesn't necessarily matter.
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There are words in our English language that we would only they can have a variety of meanings.
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And they're really all that matters is what does it mean in the given context? Same thing in the Greek. If a word can have seven different meanings and you say, well, you know, 98 percent of the time it means
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X, therefore here it means X might not be the case. You need to know what it means in context.
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And so we always want to get back to the context. Now, listen to what he says here about Mark.
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Chapter three says, but does the reference in Mark provide a true analogy for the binding of Satan in Revelation 20, verses one to three, and this is what
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Augustine, Augustine, Augustine claimed. A careful examination of Mark, chapter three, verse 27 in Revelation 21 to three leads to the conclusion that the two passages are not teaching the same truth.
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There is a sense in which, according to the gospel account, Satan is in the process of being bound by the activity of Christ in the kingdom of God.
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But this is clearly an event different from the total consigning of Satan to the abyss as taught in Revelation 20, verses one to three.
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And I'm going to I'm going to skip now to one of my professors, Dr. Thomas. This one, he says, he says, the only way one could view
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Satan as bound before a time in the future, in other words, the only way you could see him bound now.
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Would be to construe his binding as a restriction of his activity, not a cessation of it, in other words, that he's somehow restricted, he's hobbled.
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He's handicapped and can't fully exercise everything he'd like to do right now, and that that's what it's talking about in Revelation, chapter 20.
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Dr. Thomas goes on to say, though, that it is the uniform testimony of the
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New Testament that Satan is not bound during the period between Christ to advents. When you see that, what is an advent coming?
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Right. His appearances, his first advent when he was born, a second advent when he returns, a second coming.
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A further problem for a view that this paragraph recapitulates the present era is its inability to explain
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Satan's release at the end of the millennium. Now, that is a real problem. Why is that a problem for a non -literal interpretation of Revelation, chapter 20?
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Yeah, I mean, if you want to take it that way, sure. Yeah, if you just say that he he cannot deceive believers anymore and then he's loosed, now they can deceive believers.
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Yep, that would be a problem. I like I like how
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Thomas phrases this. He says. What restrictions currently placed on him will be removed at the end of this age?
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In other words, if you're going to say that he's bound, but that doesn't mean that he's literally bound and tied up and immobile and not able to do anything, it just means that he's restricted.
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He's no longer able to deceive people the same way. Others explain it this way, that the binding of Satan is merely the fact that the gospel now is free to be preached everywhere.
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It's no longer restricted to the Jews, but it gets to go to the entire world. And he says again, what restrictions placed on him now will be removed at the end of this age?
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And he says no credible answer to this question has ever been advanced. Even proponents of some form of recapitulation concur that their view does not rest primarily on exegesis of particular texts, but on the analogy of faith and analogy of faith is what
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I was saying earlier. It's this idea that there are other passages that seem to talk about the same idea.
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So you take your understanding of those passages and then you put them there. Now, is it wrong? As I said, it's not wrong to use analogy of faith or some people call it cross referencing, however you want to look at it.
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But if you are to make a list, a hierarchical list of hermeneutics, how you come to the right understanding of a particular passage, your first thing that you want to look at is what?
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Immediate context. And then you want to go, you know, like, let's say it still doesn't make sense.
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Maybe you're in first Peter. Well, you can now you can still look within the book of first Peter and try to understand what he's saying.
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That would be better. And then maybe even go into Peter's other writings and his other sermons and try to understand it.
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That would be better than just going, OK, now I'm going to go to Genesis or now
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I'm going to go wherever to kind of verify my theory. The binding, this is
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Thomas again, the binding and imprisonment of Satan will not be limited to believers. As the language of 20 to 20 versus one to three says, he says what not able or he's going to be not able to deceive the nations, in other words, the whole world.
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So it's not just the believers. Now, Mount says this, says careful attention needs to be given to the text of revelation itself.
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All the text actually says is that during a period designated as a thousand years,
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Satan is bound and cast into the abyss, which is then locked and sealed. The purpose of the confinement is not to punish him, but to prevent him from deceiving the nations.
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The elaborate measures taken to to ensure his custody are most easily understood as implying the complete cessation of his influence on Earth rather than a curbing of his activities.
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The abyss is sealed as a special precaution against escape. In other words, he says, if you just read it normally, if you employ what
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Pastor Mike calls the plumber's hermeneutic, you would never come to some kind of convoluted understanding of it.
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Grant Osborne, he says this chapter is difficult primarily because of the debate over the millennium that has consumed far too much energy through the centuries.
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Now, you know what? I would agree with him on that. Why would I agree with him on that? Why is there probably too much time spent on.
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Worrying about the millennium. It can take your eyes off of Jesus.
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And what it certainly does is what I mean, ultimately, if you understand the millennium rightly, if you think I'm looking forward to the millennium personally, why?
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Because I believe Christ is going to be ruling and reigning from Jerusalem, that there's going to be peace on the Earth, that there's going to be perfect justice on the
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Earth and everything that we basically dream about for a thousand years is going to happen on this
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Earth. But I think there's too much energy spent on it because ultimately, however it works out, you know, in the end, what do we know?
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Jesus wins. That's the ultimate truth of scripture. Osborne goes on to say this, since there is only one passage in scripture that directly teaches a millennium and since the arguments of the sides are almost equally valid, it's debatable.
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There should not be the type of rigidity we too often see attached to this issue. And I agree with that.
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Why? Because the main issue is what? The gospel. It's the truth of the gospel.
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It's the truth of God's holiness, our sinfulness. Those are the things that need to be stressed. But here it's interesting.
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He says, you know, even though he thinks it's controversial and they're equally good arguments, he says, I believe the data point more to a premillennial stance.
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Since that does more justice to the natural flow of the text. Yet whatever one's position, certain themes stand out in the narrative, the sovereignty of God, the futility of Satan, right?
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Because he's able to bind him, sends an angel to do it, doesn't even do it himself. And then he goes on to say, though the nations have a thousand, have had a thousand years to experience the benign authority of Christ.
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Think about that again, you know, turning weapons into plowshares, all the plowshares, all that stuff.
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And Isaiah 2, as soon as Satan is released, they flock after him. This tells the reader that God's only response must be eternal punishment.
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The power of sin. This is a great point. The power of sin is eternal over those who have rejected
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Christ again and again, as seen in the repeated repudiations of God's offer of repentance throughout the book.
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Then we'll just close a couple of. Different viewpoints here, the key of the abyss in 20 verse one is similar to the keys in chapters one, three, six and nine, especially chapter six and nine, which all pertain to realities during the church age.
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The abyss in nine one to two and twenty one to twenty verse one is probably a synonym for death in Hades.
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Yet it says, therefore, the symbol of the key in the earlier chapters has a generally overlapping sense with its use in 20 verse one, though the precise application in each case is different.
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The angel binds the devil with a chain for a thousand years, just as the first creation appears to have been preceded by a battle between the sea monster and God.
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So the creation of the new heavens and new earth must be preceded by such a battle. This means that the restraint of Satan is a direct result of Christ's resurrection.
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The decisive defeat of the devil that occurred at Christ's death and resurrection, that's why he's bound now.
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Another guy says, consider, let's see, what has happened is that the gospel has been made available to the nations in general instead of being restricted to the
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Jews since the time of Christ has been a universal gospel. Seems, therefore, to be quite in accord with scripture to see in the millennium of Revelation 20, verse three, a period in which
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Satan is no longer able to keep in his custody the nations which till Christ came to bind him and steal them away were all together in his power.
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And then finally, Simon Kistemacher, John's term, I saw need not be seen as chronological succession because he has these visions over and over again.
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He says the one here describes an angel coming down out of heaven. This verse is very reminiscent of the warfare in heaven when
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Michael and his archangels defeated Satan and his horde and dispatched them to the earth. Taking another section and bringing it in here, he says this binding refers to restrictions
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God placed on the evil one. In the form of depriving him of power and authority,
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Satan and his fallen angels are bound as to a rope which can be more or less lengthened, they can try to free themselves, but it is impossible for them to be released.
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John intended not a literal binding, but a figurative restraint whereby Satan is unable to perform his wickedness as he did prior to his restriction.
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And he says the devil is still active, prowling like a roaring lion, seeking erring sinners whom he may devour.
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But Satan can only go as far as God permits. Well, we would agree with that, right? But he says if the binding of Satan is a symbolic act, he assumes that it is, then it is reasonable to assume that this term of a thousand years may also be interpreted symbolically.
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And I guess my main point here is when you get into symbolism, when you say, well, that's only a symbol.
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First of all, how do you know that what in the context would make you say that it's a symbol? And secondly, once you start allegorizing or making symbols of different things, where do you stop?
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So people have said, you know, where do we stand in Bethlehem Bible Church, where we stand in Bethlehem Bible Church?
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We're basically just plumbers. We look at Revelation 20 and we say
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Satan will be bound for a little one thousand years. We say Christ will rule for a little one thousand years.
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We believe that there's a future for Israel and we'll talk more about that in the weeks to come. And the rest of this won't be so academic.
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But I just wanted us to get a flavor of the idea that there are a great many men.
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And I, you know, I love the writing of Simon Kistemacher. I think he's very insightful, very helpful. And so when
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I when I send out the email and I say, you know, you want to get the Hendrickson Kistemacher commentary set, it's because a great set outside of the book of Revelation where it's maybe not so helpful.
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But these are these are good and godly men. And this this is, I think, the fruit of hundreds and hundreds of years of allegorization, which is just kind of crept in and taken hold of the church.
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And there are some things which which we just haven't fully reformed yet. I think that was the message source of one of MacArthur's message.
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One year he said that, you know, every good Calvinist is is premillennial.
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So he kind of got into a little trouble with that one. But anyway, we believe the
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Lord's coming again, that he will rule and reign for a thousand years and he will rule and reign from Jerusalem.
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And next week, we'll talk about covenants and we'll talk about a few more things and then we'll we'll get back to what what we were doing before.
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But let's pray, Father in heaven, make us better students of your word.
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Just send us again and again to the text, Lord, don't for any of us, don't let us take shortcuts, don't let us just take the meaning of of one verse, maybe out of context, but send us again and again back to your word until we grasp it for ourselves.
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Father, we would just pray for everyone here that we would be faithful students, that your word would be illumined.
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By your Holy Spirit, that our minds would be open to your truth, Father, I pray that you would protect us each from any kind of errant thinking.
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Father, would you just bless us here today as we seek to understand your word better, that we might know you better, that we might worship you more fully.